Mile 666: The Trail Revealed the Story

Jessica Janos did not write a screenplay for “Mile 666.” She packed a camper van.

It was during COVID. Janos had recently worked with actress and producer Gracie Gillam on a film in Louisiana. About a year later, the two met up again in Los Angeles, and Gillam told Janos she wanted to make a horror film. It was work they both loved, and horror felt like something they could realistically produce themselves and actually get out into the world.

Gillam had been living in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband and fellow actor, Nat Zang, who would also star in the film. Janos’s partner, Nick C. Johnson, is a thru-hiker with a deep knowledge of the Appalachian Trail. The pieces started falling into place. “We decided that summer that we were simply going to do it,” said Janos. “We packed our camper van, loaded up the filmmaking and hiking gear, and drove across the country with my daughter, Ruby.”

From Asheville, Janos and Johnson continued north, scouting sections of the Appalachian Trail all the way into New York. They came back with the idea of making a film about thru-hikers because they already had the van, the equipment and, through Johnson, a real understanding of that world.

The story itself began to take shape while they were staying with Gillam and Zang. They would talk at the house, float down the river and develop these characters as two people moving through the strange, isolated and almost mythical environment of the Appalachian Mountains.

“We did not begin with a conventional screenplay,” Janos said. “We began with the landscape, the characters and the certainty that we were going to make a film. From there, the mountain revealed the story to us.”

Saying Yes to the Universe

The production operated from a beat sheet rather than a script. A few scenes had specifically written dialogue, but most of the work came from developing the characters’ histories with the actors. Everyone understood the complete story underneath each scene, the emotional arc they needed to reach, even when the exact words were improvised.

The entire crew consisted of four people: Janos directing and handling additional camera work, Johnson as cinematographer, and Gillam and Zang as the leads. Ruby Chappelle, Janos’s daughter, also appears in the film.

They shot over multiple trips, and between each one, Janos would assemble scenes and see what the film was becoming. She could identify what they had captured, what was still missing and how the next section should evolve. Editing was not something that began after production. They were editing the film as they made it.

“The ethos of the production was essentially to say yes to the universe,” said Janos. “Cast members, locations and unexpected story elements seemed to arrive at the moment we needed them. When you make a film this way, apparent obstacles can become opportunities.”

Two Cameras, Two Focal Lengths, No Lens Changes

They shot on two Panasonic Lumix GH5 cameras with SLR Magic anamorphic lenses. The lenses were fairly substantial compared with the small camera bodies, so each one sat in a simple cage with a top handle to support the weight and create a practical handheld unit.

The two-camera setup allowed them to keep different focal lengths mounted at the same time, something like a 35mm anamorphic on one body and a 50mm on the other. On the trail, that meant switching cameras rather than repeatedly changing lenses in the forest. They rarely had a controlled workspace, reliable power or clean conditions for handling equipment, so every part of the setup had to be simple and self-contained. Between shooting days, they camped at remote trailheads and charged equipment from solar panels.

Most of the film was shot handheld. They were hiking into remote locations and needed to remain light and mobile. The GH5’s internal stabilization helped control smaller movements, though they learned to turn it off for certain pans or deliberate camera moves because it could try to correct against the operator and produce an unnatural effect.

Janos’s own approach to handheld work was shaped by years of filming and photographing skateboarders. “That taught me what becomes possible when a camera is free to move with a subject, particularly in tight or unpredictable spaces,” she said. “I never saw handheld photography simply as a limitation. Its mobility could create intimacy, energy and a physical relationship between the camera and the person being photographed.”

That translated naturally to the trail. The camera had to travel through narrow spaces, over uneven ground and alongside the actors rather than observing them from a fixed position. Janos wanted it to feel like another body moving through the mountains.

Johnson brought a complementary kind of experience. He had filmed trail vlogs and consumed a tremendous amount of hiking content, and Janos had produced his “Nick Went Hiking” series, which he filmed while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. She already knew he could get into difficult places and find images without the infrastructure of a conventional production.

“My priorities were exposure, focus and framing,” said Johnson. “I wanted to protect the image technically without flattening the reality of the conditions we found.” They recorded in Panasonic’s V-Log L profile to retain as much latitude as possible in the highlights and shadows. Because they were working almost entirely with available light, often moving between open sunlight and dense forest within the same shot, the logarithmic image gave Janos the room to determine the final contrast, color, time of day and emotional atmosphere in Resolve.

The Green Tunnel

They established much of the film’s visual language on the first day. The goal was to use the anamorphic frame to communicate the immense width of the landscape while still making the characters feel enclosed and swallowed by the Green Tunnel. The landscape was never simply a background. It was one of the central characters in the film.

Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days” was one visual reference, particularly in the way its color and atmosphere interact with the natural environment.

But “Mile 666” is also a deeply subjective film. The characters are being overtaken by a fungal curse, and Janos did not want to photograph that experience entirely from the outside. She wanted the camera and the image to express how their perceptions were changing from within.

“Very early in the film, we come to understand that Dishes may not be a reliable narrator of her own story,” said Janos, referring to Gillam’s character by her trail name. “Her perception and the reality we are watching are continually in conflict. That meant the film needed to feel grounded in the physical world of the trail while also being capable of leaving that world and entering her mind.”

Learning to Ride a Bicycle

“Mile 666” was the first film Janos edited in DaVinci Resolve. She had worked with all of the other major editing platforms over the years, but she recognized quickly that this project needed to live in one application where editing, color and visual effects could inform one another.

“I knew very quickly, once I began assembling the material, that Resolve was where I needed to work because nearly every scene required some relationship between editing, color and visual effects,” she said. “Although there was a learning curve, the interface began to feel natural once I understood its logic.”

She watched tutorials, spoke with other filmmakers and researched specific tools whenever she encountered a problem. Before long, she was taking advice people had given her and developing new approaches she could share back with them.

“The experience was a little like learning to ride a bicycle,” Janos said. “The tutorials were someone holding the back of the seat, but once the basic principles clicked, the software was intuitive enough for me to take off on my own.”

What surprised her was how the learning process became inseparable from the creative process. Each new capability she discovered made her want to go back and reconsider how she had treated the rest of the film. “The program kept revealing new layers, almost like an onion,” she said. “Even while I was working, Resolve itself was being updated and new tools were appearing. I would see a new feature and think, ‘Oh my God, a new toy,’ and then go back into the film to see what it could add.”

A Modern Darkroom

Janos came to Resolve with a strong photography background. Her father was a photographer, and she grew up around photography and printing. At thirteen, she worked as a test printer on Ansel Adams prints at the California Museum of Photography.

Adams is a useful analogy for the way Janos approached the film. His photographs were not simply captured in the camera. They were completed in the print through exposure control, dodging and burning. Janos had never worked professionally as a colorist, but she understood how exposure could be shaped and how different areas of an image could be brought forward or held back.

“When you photograph mountains entirely with available light, you face many of the same fundamental problems Adams faced,” she said. “Resolve gave me a modern version of that darkroom.”

Grading by Feeling

Her general process was to begin with a simple base grade developed specifically for the film, primarily using curves to establish exposure, contrast and overall balance. Once she found the visual identity of a scene, she matched the remaining shots within that scene to it.

She learned fairly quickly not to overcomplicate the grade. In the beginning, she probably tried to do too much. As she became more familiar with the material and the software, she found that simplicity gave her more control.

She was not trying to make every scene match one universal ideal. She was trying to make each scene internally coherent while allowing the real conditions of the trail to remain visible. In the Appalachian Mountains, you can begin a morning completely surrounded by fog and find yourself under harsh, hot sunlight that afternoon. That rapid transformation is part of the look of the environment and therefore part of the look of the film.

The challenge was maintaining continuity in elements like skin tone and wardrobe while still respecting the changing light. Gillam’s character wears orange through much of the film, but the same orange fabric behaves very differently in fog, shade, warm daylight or a manipulated night scene. “The goal was not to make the orange mathematically identical in every shot,” Janos said. “It was to let it respond naturally to the scene while still feeling like part of one film.”

She often graded by feeling first and then used Resolve’s scopes and monitoring tools to understand why something did or did not look right. Over time, she developed reliable points of reference for skin tone, exposure and the behavior of the curves.

There were also scenes that visually echoed one another, and Janos used those relationships when building a look. The flashbacks to Dishes’s life before the trail have a subtly but noticeably different treatment. The inside of her mother’s house is cold, controlled and severe, while the green outside the windows is more inviting and alive, as though the natural world is calling her away.

“That contrast supports the story,” Janos said. “On the trail, everyone appears to be living on relatively equal terms, but each hiker has an entire previous life that the other people around them may know nothing about. The color helped distinguish who Dishes had been from who she was becoming.”

Day for Night on the Trail

One of Janos’s earliest experiments in Resolve involved day-for-night photography. Because the crew was shooting with natural light and only four people, many nighttime scenes had to be photographed during the day. The tree cover along the trail actually made this possible. They were rarely dealing with hard direct sunlight, and once the exposure was protected, Janos could bring the image down in Resolve and determine whether a scene felt like dusk, evening or night.

That freedom made it beneficial to edit in Resolve from the beginning rather than move the film between separate applications. A single shot might need an editorial decision, a color shift and a visual effect, all working together. Splitting those decisions across different programs would have meant losing the ability to see how each one affected the others.

Magic Mask and the Layered Approach

Magic Mask became one of the most useful tools in the entire process, and not only in the scenes with obvious visual effects.

“Magic Mask allowed me to isolate subjects and make those targeted adjustments without the process overwhelming the edit,” Janos said. She could pull a character slightly away from the background, alter the balance between a face and the surrounding trees or create subtle layers of exposure and color within the same frame.

That isolation technique also became the foundation of her approach to the film’s more expressive sequences. She used Magic Mask to create what was essentially an alpha layer of the subject, a clean separation of the person from the environment that could be placed over additional affected layers beneath it. The base layer was the normally edited and graded footage. Above and below it, she built layers using Motion Trails, Prism Blur, Glow and different opacity or compositing settings.

The result allowed tracers, distortion, glow and prismatic effects to accumulate around a character without completely obscuring the face or the performance. The altered world could appear to gather around the person, or emanate from them, while the character remained emotionally readable. By varying the opacity, duration and interaction of the layers, Janos could control both the intensity of the effects and the degree to which the image appeared to fall out of ordinary time.

She used this approach throughout the film, not only in the overtly psychedelic sequences. In quieter scenes, the effect might be limited to a slight aura or separation around a character, a suggestion that the mountain’s influence has begun entering the image before the characters themselves are aware of it.

Entering the Hallucination

There are two separate mushroom trips in “Mile 666,” and Janos wanted each to have its own personality, progression and narrative purpose.

Dishes’s first trip begins during the day while she is interviewing another hiker about the Appalachian Mountains for her podcast. The experience is initially expansive and euphoric. Nature feels like a kind of god calling to her. Janos began with the natural daytime grade and layered Motion Trails, Prism Blur and Glow into the image. Motion Trails created visible tracers around movement. Prism Blur introduced a rainbow aura around Dishes and the landscape. Glow gave the image a more spiritual, luminous quality. She varied the opacity and interaction of the layers so the image felt altered but still inviting.

As the trip continues into the evening and Dishes joins a séance, the experience becomes increasingly internal. The distortions become less decorative and more destabilizing. The frame warps, her body and perception seem to melt into the environment, and the boundary between her surroundings, her memories and the supernatural world begins to collapse.

The sound design follows the same progression. Janos used amplified natural sounds, ocean-like movement and a creaking sound the crew called the “pirate ship,” which resembles wood shifting under pressure but also evokes the trees themselves. The forest begins to feel like an unstable vessel carrying Dishes somewhere she cannot control.

The major turning point occurs when one of the kids at the séance channels Dishes’s dead mother and repeats words spoken on the day she died. That emotional trigger sends the trip into overdrive. The flashback, séance and altered perception begin violently colliding, not because more time has passed since she ate the mushrooms, but because her emotional defenses are breaking down. Janos used carefully positioned warp transitions to fuse the two worlds within the frame.

There is a moment when Dishes snaps her bra strap and begins falling indefinitely. The sound of a rope dropping from an earlier sequence was repurposed for the fall, and the visual was created with Dent. “The sound and visual effects were deliberately timed to carry her from one moment into the next,” said Janos.

The second mushroom sequence belongs to Achilles, Zang’s character, and it needed to feel entirely different. Dishes, under the influence of the afflicted spirits of the mountain, feeds him the mushrooms without telling him what they are. His trip is invasive and hostile from the start.

For Achilles, Janos directed Johnson to use rolling and rotational movement in camera so the world appears to turn over around him. The trees vibrate, objects refuse to remain still, and his hands develop a layered texture with a rainbow movement across the skin. That visual motif connects to the end of the film, when the characters’ bodies begin changing and becoming part of the mountain.

“I wanted the audience to feel trapped inside a very bad trip rather than simply watch it,” Janos said. The visual language changes only when Achilles breaks through the panic and becomes capable of seeing the afflicted spirits himself. What initially seemed like random sensory violence reveals its larger purpose.

The Cocoon

The bathtub sequence is one of the film’s dreamlike act breaks. The crew jokingly called it the “food porn” scene because it grew out of the things a thru-hiker might fantasize about most intensely: a bath, food and sex.

Dishes is dreaming about a bathtub because bathing is one of the basic comforts she has been denied on the trail. She is also dreaming about Achilles sexually for the first time. Narratively, this is the point at which the mountain’s curse begins directing her desire toward him, encouraging her to draw him further into what is happening.

The practical setup was simple. They shot in an ordinary bathroom during the day with two cameras: one looking down into the tub and another covering the actors from the side. Once the cameras were positioned, Gillam and Zang performed within the situation.

The larger world of the scene was created in Resolve. Janos began experimenting with a day-for-night treatment and found a particular color balance in which their skin appeared cold, wet and almost dead while retaining enough warmth to remain sensual. She wanted it to feel as though they were in a crypt, or as though their bodies had just been pulled from a river. Subtle animated lens distortion made the room seem to shift and breathe around them. Prism Blur and Glow gave the highlights an unnatural aura. The movement is less aggressive than Achilles’s trip. It is closer to the slow rocking of the “pirate ship” sound: the sensation of being inside a cocoon or womb that is moving even though it should be still.

“The practical photography gave us two actors in a bathtub,” said Janos. “Resolve transformed that ordinary bathroom into a seductive, decaying dream.”

The Preacher Scene

The most complicated sequence involved a ghostly figure in the forest, filmed over five separate days in two locations and two states. Most of the film was captured in a very immediate way, often completing a scene in one concentrated period, so bringing five days of material together into one continuous environment was a major challenge.

The footage also had to be transformed from daylight into a darker, dusk or nighttime world. A red headlamp flashes during the scene, and Janos wanted that light to feel as though it was illuminating and bouncing off the surrounding trees. She used Relight to reshape the environment and simulate the red light interacting with the forest. Cinematic Haze pulled fog and atmosphere into the image, unifying footage from different days while adding an unsettling quality.

Because the crew consisted of four people, the cast did the makeup themselves. In post, Janos used Texture Pop, color isolation, masking and layered grades to accentuate the practical effects rather than replace them. Resolve allowed her to take what they had physically created on set and make it read with greater intensity on screen.

She rebuilt the preacher sequence four or five times as she learned new tools and as Resolve introduced new features. “What I love is that, despite the number of elements involved, the finished scene does not feel like a collection of effects,” she said. “It feels like one continuous world.”

The Marble Already Has a Structure

“I often think of a film as a sculpture,” Janos said. “You begin with a block of marble and gradually chip away until the form reveals itself. The marble already has a structure, and you are working with that structure rather than forcing something onto it. That was especially true of Mile 666. The film was inside the material. The editing process was how I found it.”

That philosophy extended all the way through post production. Resolve became the space where every decision lived together: editorial, color, effects, atmosphere. For a production built around accepting whatever the trail offered, the software allowed the finishing process to carry the same openness.

“We made Mile 666 with essentially no money, an extremely small crew and a production model built around accepting what the trail gave us,” said Janos. “Resolve allowed the post production process to carry that same spirit. I could edit, grade, experiment, solve technical problems and build a complicated psychological world without leaving the project or separating those decisions from one another.”

“For a filmmaker working with limited resources, that kind of integration is incredibly liberating.”

“Mile 666” is available on Tubi.

 

Production Credits

 

CREW
Director	Jessica Janos
Cinematographer	Nick C. Johnson
Editor	Jessica Janos
Colorist	Jessica Janos
GEAR
Primary Camera	Panasonic Limix GH5
Primary Lenses	SLR Magic Anamorphic
Editorial Software	DaVinci Resolve Studio
Color Software	DaVinci Resolve Studio